Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basm Özeti
snakes were killed off in the. ättacks, but there seem to bé more snakebites, of greater toxicity, in Halabja now than before." (I asked
Richard Spertzel, a scientist and a former member of the United Nations Special Commission inspections team, if this was possible. Yes,
he said, but such a rise in snakebites was more likely due to "environmental imbalances" than to mutations.)
My conversation with Baban was suddenly interrûpted by our guerrilla escorts~ who stopped the car and asked me to join them in
one of the Land Cruisers; we veered off across a wheat field, without explanation. I was later told that we had been passing a
mountain area that had recently had problems with Islamic terrorists. .
We arrived in Halabja half an hour later. As you enter the city, you see a small statue modelled on the most famous photographic
image of the Halabja massacre: an old man, prone and lifeless, shielding his dead grandson with his body.
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A torpor seems to afflict Halabja; even its bazaar is listless and somewhat empty, in marked contrast to those of other Kurdish cities,
which are well stocked with imported goods (history and circumstance have made the Kurds enthusiastic smugglers). and are full of
noise and activity. "Everyone here is sick," a Halabja doctor told me. "The people who aren't sick are depressed." He practices at the
Martyrs' Hospital, which is situated on the outskirts of the city. The hospital has no heat and little advanced equipment; like the city
itself, it is in a dilapidated state. .
The doctor is a thin, jumpy man in a tweed jacket, and he smokes without pause. He and Baban took me on a tour of thè hospital.
Afterward, we sat in a bare office, and a woman was wheeled in. She looked seventy but said that she was fifty; doctors told meshe
suffers from lung scarring so serious that only a lung transplant could help, but there are no transplant centers in Kurdistan. The
woman, whose name is Jayran Muhammad, lost eight relatives during the attack. Her voice was almost inaudible. "] was disturbed
psychologically for a long time," she told me as Baban translated. "I believed my children were alive." Baban told me that her lungs
would fail soon, that she could barely breathe. "She is waiting to die," he said. I met ariother woman, Chia Hammassat, who was eight
at the time of the attacks and has been blind ever since. Her mother, she said, died of colon cancer several years ago, and her brother
suffers from chronic shortness of breath. "There is no hope to correct my vision," she said, her voice flat. "I was married, but I
couldn't fulfill the responsibilities of a wife because I'm blind. My husband left me."
Baban. said that in ~alabja "there are more abnormal births than normal ones," and other Kurdish doctors told me that they regularly
see children born with neural-tube defects and undescended testes and without anal openings. They are seeing-and they showed
me--children born with six or seven toes on each foot, children whose fingers and toes are fused, and children who suffer from
leukemia and liver cancer.
I met Sarkar, a shy and intelligent boy with a harelip, a cleft palate, and a growth on his spine. Sarkar had a brother born with the
same set of malformations, thE'd0("tor told mE'.hut the brl'thE'r ch0kE'd t" :ll'ilth. whill' .:.tj11"h,lh' "r' 1 ,~r.1 in ", ,.i....
Meanwhile, more victims had gathered in the hallway; the people of Halabja do not often have a chance to tell their stories to
foreigners. Some of them wanted to know if] was a surgeon, who had come to repair their children's deformities, and they were
disappointed to learn that I was a journalist: The doctor and I soon left the hospital for a walk through the northern neighborhoods
of Halabja, which were hardest hit in the attack. We were trailed by peshmerga carrying AK-47s. The doctor smoked as we talked,
and I teased him about his habit. "Smoking hassome good effect on the lungs," he said, without irony. "In the attacks, there was less
effect on smokers. Their lungs were better equipped for the mustard gas, maybe."
We walked through the alleyways of the Jewish quarter, past a former synagogue in which eighty or so Halabjans died during the
attack. Underfed cowswandered the paths. The doctor showed me several cellars where clusters of people had died. We knocked
on the gate of one house, and were let in by an old woman with a wide smile and few teeth. In the Kurdish tradition, she immediately
invited us for lunch. .
She told us the recent history of the house. "Everyone who was in this house died," she said. "The whole family. We heard there
were one hundred people." She led us to the cellar, which was damp and close. Rusted yellow cans of vegetable ghee littered the
floor. The room seemed too small to hold a hundred people, but the doctor said that the estimate sounded accurate. I asked him if
cellars like this one had ever been decontaminated. He smiled. "Nothing in Kurdistan has been decontaminated," he said.
4. AL-ANFAL
The chemical attacks on Halabja and Goktapa and perhaps two hundred other villages and towns were only a small part of the
cataclysm that Saddam's cousin, the man known as Ali Chemical, arranged for the Kurds. The Kurds say that about two hundred
thousimd were killed. (Human Rights Watch, which in the early nineties published "Iraq's Crime of Genocide," a definitive study of
the attacks, gives a figure of between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand.)
The campaign against the Kurds was dubbed al-Anfal by Saddam, after a chapter in the Koran that allows conquering Muslim armies
ta seize the spoils of .their foes. It reads, in part, "Against them"-your enemies-"make ready your strength to the utmost of your
power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom
ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatevèr ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall
not be treated unjustly."
The Anfal campaign was not an end in itself, like the Holocaust, but a means to an end-an instance of a policy that Samantha Power,
who runs the Carr Center for Human Rights, at Harvard, calls "instrumental genocide." Power has just published" 'A Problem from
Hell,' " a study of American responses to genocide. "There are regimes that set out to murder every citizen of a race," she said.
"Saddam achieved what he had to do without exterminating every last Kurd." What he had to do, Power and others say, was to
break the Kurds' morale and convince them that a desire for independence was foolish.
Most of the Kurds who were murdered in the Anfal were not killéd by poison gas; rather, the genocide was carried out, in large
part, in the traditional manner, with roundups at night, mass executions, and anonymous burials. The bodies of most of the victims of
the Anfal-mainly men and boys-have never been found.
. .
One day, I met one of the thousands of Kurdish women known as Anfal widows: Salma Aziz Baban. She lives outside Chamchamal, in
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